Category: Contains Nuts

roasted brussels sprouts with agrodolce and feta

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In this charmless era where the murmurs of backlash begin to brew before a rising entity has time to be completely perceived, let alone overrated, I do enjoy a good slow-burn image rehabilitation. When deserved. In the case of the blameless brussels sprout, that metonymic representative of a small child’s innate suspicion of greens, that dinner-as-punishment vegetable, it’s unsurprisingly much more palatable when roasted or generally scorched over high heat in some fashion than boiled into limp and pallid reprehensibility.

And when you add agrodolce and a snowfall of crumbled feta? The brussels sprout is not only rehabilitated, it’s utterly impervious to the backlash cycle.

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caramel banana self-saucing pudding

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I was explaining to a friend how tired I am, and illustrated my point by saying I’d watched Goodfellas a week prior but still hadn’t worked up the energy to log it on Letterboxd; and immediately realised that probably wasn’t a dramatic as it sounded in my head. But the fact is I am tired and this blog has suffered as a result (and so have my numerous other open tabs, including Goodfellas on Letterboxd which I finally logged yesterday; whereupon the nation undoubtedly breathed a sigh of relief.) Indeed, I made this Caramel Banana Self-Saucing Pudding several weeks ago and apparently needed this much run-up to write about it, but here it is at last, and it’s fantastically delicious.

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Pasta with Fried Marinated Zucchini

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Well-intentioned people spent years telling us, quite rightly, that we should be eating seasonally but now between climate change and inflation and the insistence on growing and selling us out-of-season food anyway, I’m not sure seasons even exist meaningfully anymore, not least culinarily. Which is why I’m making this kind of flagrantly summery recipe for pasta with fried marinated zucchini in the middle of winter because, I don’t know, the in-season food isn’t any cheaper nor better quality.

I’m also making it because it’s delicious but you know I can never miss an opportunity to pitch stentorian wrath towards the supermarket duopoly! And they certainly keep me rich in such opportunities (if not in seasonal produce.)

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Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Snacking Cake with Brown Sugar Icing

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Look, I am standing with a foot on both sides of the fence here: I still find the phrase “snacking cake” irritating and yet continuously, willfully bake cakes that undeniably fit this billing. I think it started when I got myself a 25cm square tin: such width, such surface area, there’s something so accessible and appealing and genuinely snackable about the cakes its shallow walls bear. The latest iteration is this Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Snacking Cake with Brown Sugar Icing; yes, it’s a cake, but it’s definitely of the snacking variety, almost veering into slice territory. After getting most of my disdain out of the way with my Lemon Polenta Snacking Cake I’ve probably got about one more cake like this left before I have to give up on the whole scornful thing and just proceed in earnest.

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Pecan Pie Crunch Slice

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Asking what my favourite anything is — colour, song, movie, production of Sondheim’s musical Company — will not warrant a simple response but instead invites you to a dialogue, no, a diatribe, where I meticulously explain the respective merits of my many, many favourite things. I’m indecisive, sure, but may I reframe it: there is just so much in this world for me to love, and who could possibly commit to a singular favourite under such circumstances? That being said, slices — both the baked and the melt-and-mix-and-refrigerate type — are high up in the echelons of my favourite sugar-based foods and possibly, if I really had to choose, they could be my actual favourites (along with cakes, cookies, muffins, puddings, ice cream, pastries…) It’s that texture-forward focus of slices that makes them so inviting to the bite, and their oddly alluring ability to hold numerous pre-packaged ingredients; this Pecan Pie Crunch Slice absolutely delivers on both fronts.

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Lemon Polenta Snacking Cake with Lemon Custard Buttercream

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While I am curious and uninhibited about emerging food trends, the term “snacking cake” inspires within me a certain luddite cantankerousness. How can this term justify its existence when all cakes can be snacked upon? I don’t need a cake to announce its relevance to me! And the offered criteria seems to just describe, well, cakes. I understand that we have yoga pants and riding boots and breakfast burritos and so on but “snacking” is too broad a verb to cling to that noun with such unmerited authority as far as I’m concerned.

However!

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Small-batch Peanut Mocha Cookies (gluten-free)

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Despite the fact that not once in my sixteen-year career as a food blogger have I ever had a large group of dependents to regularly feed, I still tend to bake as though many hands will be reaching for the finished product. What can I say, I like filling the tins, I like abundance, I like knowing that the sweetmeat I’ve eaten won’t be my last, that it has brothers rising up and multiplying behind it like the brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (actually that’s not a great analogy because that part terrified me as a kid, but it demonstrates the vibe nonetheless.) What care I for the small-batch cookie? Not much, initially. But my head can reliably be turned by novelty value, and so here we find ourselves with these Small-Batch Peanut Mocha Cookies, the yield of which can be easily summarised by Dee Dee Ramone counting off a song.

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Sheet Pan Gnocchi Puttanesca

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Look, I’m the first to yell about how SEO has ruined food blogging and I know we probably don’t say “sheet pan” in New Zealand, but sometimes you have to dance with the enemy in order to steal their jewels, and so this recipe is called Sheet Pan Gnocchi Puttanesca in the hopes that capitulating to Big Algorithm delivers me some sweet, sweet optimisation. That modern ugliness aside, what this recipe will undoubtedly deliver you is a delicious, hands-off dinner in little more than half an hour.

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Simple Rhubarb and Custard Tart

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Sometimes when a recipe appears visuals-first to me the result is abundantly successful, like these Marble Heart Cookies. And sometimes, in the case of today’s recipe, which I envisaged decorated with pink plaited ropes of shaved rhubarb fibres to tumultuous applause and frantic, viral sharing, it…simply doesn’t work. The stringy fibres did not braid smoothly, producing a bedraggled, limp and hairball-ish rope that immediately unravelled. So I set aside that folly and continued with this Simple Rhubarb and Custard Tart unadorned but for some green tendrils of thyme, and perhaps it’s for the best: chewing through a fibrous lashing of interlaced rhubarb would be, at the least, counterproductive, and the brink-pink splendour of the rhubarb stems themselves provide their own plentiful visual spectacle.

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Pumpkin Seed Pastry Hearts

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Call it Occam’s Cost-of-Living-Crisis Razor: sometimes the cheapest solution is the best one. Or at least, comparable. This recipe started life using pistachios, because I am a simple woman who will always be swayed by the glamour of that specific drupe. As is often the case the easiest recipes require the most testing — and by round three of working out the precise ratio of honey to sugar to oven heat I replaced the pistachios with pumpkin seeds as a less expensive green placeholder. Before you know it, we had a Shirley MacLaine/Carol Haney/The Pajama Game situation on our hands, where the bigtime producers were in town on the one day the understudy went on for the star. The pumpkin seeds performed proficiently, so pumpkin seeds it is.

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